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Travel and the art of losing

Travel is a bittersweet affair. The act of leaving is always and necessarily a form of loss, and if you wish to travel, you must leave. Twice, in fact, in most cases. Once to get there, once to come back. Furthermore, while travelling you also stand to lose:

STUFF

Objects. Goods and possessions. This is nothing to worry about. I am not saying be careless with your stuff. Just that there is no point fretting. There are very few situations in which the loss of stuff matters a bean in the long term. Even in the short term. Indeed, there is a powerful case to be made for the usefulness of losing certain kinds of stuff every now and then. Your wallet or purse. Your handbag. Your phone. That ragged manuscript of your first novel, all those tortuous years in the making, which, as you have known for ages in your heart of hearts, was never quite right, could have done with some fine-tuning, perhaps a little more in the way of restructuring, possibly a total rewrite from beginning to end. Losing any of these things only proves that life goes on without them. So, if you are fearful of material losses while travelling, back up your gizmos, take out insurance, pack less and accept the transience of material things. Next!

YOURSELF (PHYSICALLY)

Everybody is bound to get lost - lost in the street, on the highway, on the high seas - from time to time. Especially if you have also lost your phone, with its convenient maps app. The loss of your phone and your bearings might well lead in turn to a further loss, that of your temper. Take a deep breath and try to maintain a sense of humour. Mostly a wrong turn will lead to nothing more sinister than a mild surprise, and if you were not in the market for surprises, you would have stayed at home. Cast your eyes towards the heavens and learn to navigate according to the position of the sun and the stars. Actually, there is a great app to help you with that. Oh, wait. You lost your phone. Sorry. Still, the point about the sun and the stars stands. Life skills, you know.

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YOURSELF (FIGURATIVELY)

Travel affects different people in different ways. It causes some to shrink into ever more grotesque, mean, narrow-minded caricatures of themselves, others to expand smilingly into unfamiliar surroundings, to embrace difference, to lose themselves and, in the process, become somehow more completely themselves. Friends of mine tell me that the mystical jungle drug ayahuasca can help in this respect. I am too squeamish to try it, deterred by the prospect of losing control not only of my thoughts but also of my bodily functions - a kind of loss that I will put off for as many years as possible, thank you very much. If you need chemical assistance to loosen up, it seems to me that gin is simpler, more convenient and on the whole less risky.

PRECONCEPTIONS

There is great charm in the notion that travel, simply by exposing you to foreign peoples and their foreign ways, will disabuse you of your ugliest prejudices and turn you into a better person. I suspect this happens much less often than we might wish. It is, I think, more realistic to speak of the ways in which travel can ease you out of certain lazy preconceptions and unexamined habits of thought, rather than provoking thoroughgoing moral and behavioural change. 'Turns out the Froggies aren't all bad.' Well. Baby steps.

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What may we conclude from this? Perhaps only that the traveller's losses are of an intriguingly paradoxical nature. I would go so far as to say that in the final reckoning the traveller's losses are not losses at all but gains. The traveller always gets back more than he or she loses.

If we were feeling especially philosophical, we might even say that the losses we sustain when we travel serve a still more useful purpose, to the extent that, imperceptibly, by degrees, they prepare us for other losses, losses of all kinds and all sizes.

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The last word on this subject must go to Elizabeth Bishop, a woman who travelled a great deal and lost a great deal on the way, and who summed up the connections more elegantly than anybody else ever has, or, I suppose, ever will, in her exquisite villanelle, One Art:

Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. - Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.